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Message: [QUOTE="nelsonmuntz, post: 4811836, member: 833"] I can promise with 1 million percent certainty that the sportswriters covering this have not even scratched the surface of the implications of this proposal actually being implemented. College sports will lose fans if it cuts a lot of schools out of competition, and if it loses enough fans, college sports will go into a death spiral of shrinking mass appeal. I don't think that occurs at 60-70 teams competing at the highest level (although it might), but it probably happens as the number of schools approaches 40. All of these schools committing to massive future expenses when the conferences are on their last big linear contract seems insane. Streaming has dramatically fragmented content, yet the P4 are acting like they will consolidate all the fans into a few dozen schools. There is a meaningful chance that the top academic schools (Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Rice, Northwestern) simply don't participate, and there will be a lot of pressure on Notre Dame by its alumni to join them if that happens. By Notre Dame alumni, I mean actual alumni, and not just message board bandwagon fans. The NFL and NBA are going to elevate their minor leagues to compete with college sports. You can write that in stone. The most difficult to predict impact will be the incentives for athletes to commit years of their youth and adolescence developing their skills for sports when the number of opportunities to play in those sports will be shrinking. There are no equivalents to college football and college basketball anywhere else in the world. The emergence of those two sports as major revenue producers was the result of a confluence of many factors, some of which are fading or getting undermined by recent developments in college sports. There are a lot of industries that thought things were never going to change for the worse right up until they did. [/QUOTE]

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